After hours
Off the clock. Still answered.
Your assistant does not keep your hours. It answers all night, takes the details, and tells the caller you will get back to them. What reaches your phone at 11pm is entirely your call.
Your hours are one of the seven questions. Change what wakes you whenever you like.
Your choice
Four settings, one of which is nothing.
This lives on the same screen as your business hours, because that is the only place it makes sense. Change it any time.
What the plans cost| Setting | Calls | Texts | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Everything | Wakes you | Wakes you | Nights are when you win the work. |
| Calls only | Wakes you | Till morning | A ringing phone is worth waking up for. A text is not. |
| Urgent only | Only if urgent | Only if urgent | What most people pick. Sleep through the quote requests, wake for the burst pipe. |
| Nothing | Till morning | Till morning | The night is the night. It is all in the morning summary. |
We pick one for you based on what you told us you do, so it is not one more question at signup. Emergency trades start on urgent only, everyone else starts on nothing. If more than one of you is on the account, whoever is on call that night is the one whose phone goes off.
What the caller hears
Nobody gets sent to voicemail.
A held call is still a fully answered call. Your assistant takes the name, the problem and the number, and closes it honestly rather than pretending you are about to pick up.
Open one and see the whole callThanks. They are tied up right now, but they will get back to you.
Nothing in that message tells a customer they were turned away, and nothing about it changes when you are asleep versus when you decline a call at noon.
Quiet time
After hours, whenever you need it.
Quiet time is the same thing as after hours, on demand. One tap and you stop getting paged, while your assistant keeps answering exactly as it would at midnight.
- Urgent still gets through, if you want it to
- It ends by itself next time you open BusyTel
- One tap turns it off early
- Everyone on the account is told when it starts
There is no duration picker and no schedule builder, on purpose. Indefinite quiet time is how a business loses a week of calls without noticing.
How urgent gets decided
We never ask a caller if it is urgent.
Ask a caller if it is urgent and they say yes, because they want to get to the front of the line. So we do not ask. Urgency comes from what they actually said, the time they said it, and the kind of work you do.
Get one wrong and you tell us on the call page. That teaches your account, and it feeds the wider system. One call never flips how everything behaves.
| What the caller said | What it is treated as |
|---|---|
| Water is coming through the ceiling | Urgent |
| No hot water since this morning | Urgent |
| Quote for a new bathroom in the spring | Morning |
Questions
Questions about nights and weekends.
Answered at 2am. Woken only if it matters.
Set your hours, pick what wakes you, and get on with the day.
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